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ECONOMICAL MEANS OF CONVEYING INFORMATION IN MODERN MEDIA

Source

Abstract

The article focuses on different active means of compression of utterance and text, employed in modern newspapers writing on socio-political matters. This results in the information in structurally simple sentences being presented in condensed form with a heavier load of meaning. It appears, that given the choice of means of conveying information the preference, as a rule, will be for the structurally simplest, reduced variants and at the same time for the most expressive. The article analyses in detail one of such means - structurally simple sentences whose nominative meaning is derived from several propositions. These are called simple polypropositive sentences. Aiming at being closer to the addressee allows modern mass media to actively use colloquial speech patterns characterized by economy of expression. For instance, journalists might substitute nominal structures with concrete proper names requiring the knowledge of context. The influence of colloquial speech on the language of modern media is felt in the use of condensed attributive structures resulting from the transformation of a predicative unit into an attributive word combination. Such compressed structures make unusual, highly expressive and often metaphorical utterances, enhancing the impact on the reader. The article also deals with reduced question-answer unities. It is the initial question that is most often reduced and only the author's reaction to the potential opponent's question is given. As a rule, it is in the form of an ordinary disagreement masked as agreement. Authorizing structures are also used. Instead of a full predicative unit naming the source of information and the way it was got, journalists might opt for condensed structures with deverbatives, that are included into the sentence as an introductory component. Economically effective in the media are also precedent phenomena that allow to compress the text by references to the background knowledge of mass addressee. Metaphors might also be included here as condensed comparisons. The article also analyses pragmatic functions of inverted commas which help to implicitly express objective and some subjective meanings of the utterance and whole text passages.

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Financed by the National Centre for Research and Development under grant No. SP/I/1/77065/10 by the strategic scientific research and experimental development program:
SYNAT - “Interdisciplinary System for Interactive Scientific and Scientific-Technical Information”.